John Sims creates works of art that creatively destroy the Confederate flag.
Photograph: Courtesy of John Sims

Progressive rebels in the American south fight a flag – and the Klansman next door

Read more

It’s some 150 years after the end of the Civil War, and the question of what to do with the Confederate flag has been looming daily over the United States – even as the burning of black churches is under investigation and we celebrate the founding of the nation. Should we pull the flag right down from the South Carolina statehouse, as Bree Newsome heroically did? Remove it from physical and cyber store shelves, as Walmart and Amazon have done? Ban video games depicting it, like Apple did last week, and pull TV shows like the the Dukes of Hazzard, which glorify it from reruns, as TV Land did this week?

According to John Sims, a political math artist, we should “confront it, reimagine it and then burn and bury it.” For 15 years, Sims has wrestled with the Confederate flag in his multi-media piece Recoloration Proclamation. In the late 1990s (when battles raged over the stars and bars in South Carolina – sound familiar?), Sims was disturbed by the flag’s prevalence when he moved to Florida, which “wasn’t even in the deep south.”

As an artist, Sims wanted to “move from civil disobedience space” and his desire to tear the flag down, to a “creative resistance space.” He began by coloring the flag for an exhibition in New York — first red, black and green for black nationalism, later black on black, and white on white — to explore “the place of black folks” in Confederate mythology, and to ask, “How can the Confederate flag be representative of the full south?”

In 2004, Sims was invited to bring his flag work to Gettysburg. He wanted to install an outdoor work called, “The Proper Way to Hang A Confederate Flag,” in which he’d hang the flag from a 13-foot gallows before burning and burying it – in essence, lynching it. The expected controversy ensued, though not entirely predictably: while the Sons of the Confederacy “went ballistic,” Sims says, the protests came also from HK Edgerton, an African American defender of the Confederate flag (or “flagger”). Then organizers moved Sims’s installation indoors, where the gallows wouldn’t fit, and Sims boycotted his own show. (Sims finally got to build his gallows in Tallahassee 2007, at a museum across the street from the Florida capitol where, the New York Times reported, “until 2001 a white flag featuring the Confederate emblem flew.”)

In Baltimore days after the riots this spring, Sims decided he’d spend Memorial Day creating 13 Eulogies, where he organized “13 flag funeral around the south, in the 13 states associated with the stars in the confederate flag.” Poets and artists eulogized, burned and buried the flag across what had been Dixie.

“I have come to the realize that the Confederate flag is about fear. Black people’s fear of violence and racism, Sims said. “The idea was not just to create a piece of work,” but to give people a way to a chance for “confrontation of the fear through creative resistance.”

Sims plans to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War by spending this 4 July organizing flag funerals not just in the South, but in all 50 states. (Markers of the Confederacy, including Yale University’s Calhoun College, are not just in the south, after all.)

Sims doesn’t think that there is anything distracting about examining the role of the Confederate flag as part of a broader fight against racism, a sentiment I agree with. “If you cannot deal with the things you can see and touch,” he asked, “how do you deal with the things you can’t touch, that are more abstract?”

“If it doesn’t come down after South Carolina,” he predicts, “it will never come down.”

I applaud Sims’s thoughtful burnings, and see no problem with pushing the stars and bars from most public spaces except for museums and books. Publicly, when even then Florida Governor Jeb Bush moved a flag with the Confederate emblem to a museum back in 2001, there’s little case for not doing so with every other one on government land. Privately, when a has-been star of the Dukes of Hazzard complains about his show being pulled over the flag’s prominence on a car known as the General Lee, I have little sympathy. I wasn’t allowed to watch that show as a kid because my parents, rightly, believed it engendered sympathy for white supremacy and instilled a tacit sense of black submission. Like whistling Dixie, defending the Confederate flag means harkening for the status quo.

Sims’ work asks us to confront and question – not ignore or defend – the flag in provocative ways. Without pretending it doesn’t exist, he asks us to look at it, wrestle with it, reimagine it — and then, to make a conscious choice to burn and then bury it, again and again, until white supremacy is dead.